


Diving Man

by hidingmontreal



Series: The Goner [2]
Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, Gibson's Real Name Is Philippe Hugo Guillet, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 10:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17221955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hidingmontreal/pseuds/hidingmontreal
Summary: This is a story that tracks the tumultuous journey of an English soldier through WW2. "In a perverse sort of way, I was glad that even if the world wasn't coming to an end, I would get to see it like that. It's completely mental now, when I think of it. I didn't know what was going on. We were in France but I thought Britain was still alright, still there 'cross the Channel, unscathed — down a few men, sure, but nothing that couldn't be recovered. I was stupid, I didn't realize, even fucking then, that it wasn't just France’s war."





	Diving Man

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story from Tommy's perspective which runs parallel to and continues the one told in The Goner. [I highly suggest reading that one first.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14482719)
> 
> This story follows Tommy from the time leading up to WW2, through the Dunkirk evacuation and through the entire war. It also features flash forwards to after the war has ended.
> 
> Note that Tommy's childhood friend is Henry Dawson. He is Peter Dawson's older brother and Mr. Dawson's eldest son from the film. In Dunkirk, he was part of the RAF and died the third week into the war. All of this remains true here.

**1940**

When the soldier's feet touched British soil, his body still felt seabourne, as though Britain itself were floating laboriously along the English Channel, trying to find its bearings.

The soldier kept looking over his shoulder at the water as though Germany were right behind him, ready to strike from the dark at any moment. It felt urgent, his country's terribly disadvantaged state of affairs. How many ships and airplanes had gone down? How many men had descended to the bottom of the Channel? How many French were left that would continue to fight by their side?

The soldier looked to his French companion both for signs of comfort and signs of impending danger. The Frenchman looked pale under the black oil marring his face and his hazel eyes darted around restlessly as though looking for a way out. Tommy had so many questions too, about his friend's fate. Where would he go now? What would become of him? 

He felt a heaviness in the centre of his chest and held his hand up to it, massaging the area with the pads of his fingers. The Frenchman in the British uniform looked back at him with guarded eyes, his thoughts apparently curling his lips. The man reached out and gave his hand a gentle squeeze, a quick moment of contact where cold hands wrapped around warm ones. 

If Tommy could be honest with himself, he would recognize that lingering gaze for what it was. He would recognize the excuses the Frenchman made to touch him — a brush of the shoulders, a squeeze to the arm, the press of boots or the huddling of bodies against the wind whipping into the Channel at night. Tommy though, was so rarely honest or fair with himself over these matters. So often in his nineteen years on Earth had he acted with the ruminations of his mind over the reactions of his muscles. It was a necessary reflex, or lack thereof, because all the times he had let himself act on impulse, things had seemed to go so horribly awry so quickly. 

 

 

**1938**

The soldier was once just a seventeen year old boy in London. He was tall and skinny and endlessly teased by too many sisters and overly restricted by two severe parents. 

The years before the war were filled with political murmurings and paranoias but that world never touched Tommy. He was a teenager who simply had no intention of growing up too quickly and no notions of making a mark on the world.

He spent his afternoons getting into trouble with his best friend, a boy named Henry Dawson. 

Henry was lively, exuberant, a carnival of a boy who went about a hundred kilometres an hour and it was always Tommy who was left playing catch-up. Henry, whose old man and baby brother were warm and kind to Tommy in a way his parents were not, felt like family. Which is why, when he reached the age of eleven and realized the nature of his fondness for the blond-haired boy, he would do anything to keep the boy both in his confidence and in the dark.

The truth of the matter was he nursed his infatuation, it was his only obsession. With five sisters, Tommy blamed them for his inclinations, them and his parents who he thought for sure had been meant to have a girl when they had him instead.

When they were young, they would make things up, games of make-believe, but as they grew older Henry outgrew pretending sooner than he did. Instead he obsessed over airplanes, a love inherited from his father. Tommy, on his part, only ever inherited a sense of moral righteousness from his own father. A righteousness he only ever applied to Henry when he made a pass at one of the waitresses at a pub. 

 

 

Tommy and Henry went to one such pub one rainy afternoon, cutting class on Henry's insistence. Henry convinced a young waitress to serve them too many pints of ale and Tommy found himself in an exhilarated, foggy state faster than he intended. In that happy state, he looked at Henry's sharp jawline and pink lips and wanted. 

Instead, Tommy spilled a second glass of water and Henry guided them out of the pub.

“Alright. S'time to go!”

“No, I'm havin’ a good time,” Tommy protested.

“Too good, it would seem.”

“That’s bollocks.”

Henry pressed warm hands onto his shoulders and coaxed him upright, “Come on, mate. ‘Fore you get us banned.” 

Outside it was still afternoon and raining, and a fine mist blurred the lenses of his glasses. 

“C'mon.”

They walked to a park nearby and sheltered from the rain under a large sycamore.

Tommy hiccuped then stumbled into the other boy's periphery, using his hands to steady himself on Henry’s shoulder. He pulled out a cigarette and attempted to light it, flicking the flint several times. 

Henry huffed a short laugh, “You can’t handle your drink. I don’t know why I’m surprised.” 

He leaned in close, taking the lighter and holding it up to the cigarette held between Tommy’s lips. As Henry’s hands came up to protect the small flame, his eyes caught Tommy’s and there was a moment when Henry looked at him in a way he never had before. His blue eyes darted from his eyes to his lips, back and forth. The cigarette caught flame and the lighter extinguished. Tommy slowly raised his hand to pull the cigarette away. Henry didn’t move, staying close, and Tommy, in his drunken state, could only think how much he wanted it. He moved in closer, spontaneously, and caught the corner of Henry’s mouth. Henry returned the kiss, aligning perfectly. Tommy’s heart was pounding, the cigarette falling from his fingers, and he grasped the other’s neck. The kiss was feverish.

Henry's hand snaked down Tommy's trousers and when he finished, they stayed there, side by side, with their backs pressed up against the tree. 

Their hands intertwined occasionally but they didn’t utter a word. 

 

 

Henry avoided Tommy for a week after their tryst in the park. Tommy felt excitement followed by mortification followed by more excitement. He went back and forth like that for days. Eventually, the anger and hurt grew more prominent as Henry dodged his attempts to speak to him. Tommy feared Henry mighht tell his father who might tell his parents. His parents would kick him out. He was sure. 

Finally a full week had gone by and Henry approached him casually after school. He had news. 

Henry joined the Royal Airforce. 

“What?”

“I joined the Airforce.”

“When?”

“‘Bout a week ago.”

Tommy felt Henry’s reply like a kick to the stomach. 

“Why'd you do that?”

Tommy was seventeen and he had no notion of what joining meant but he quickly learned that Henry did. Henry wanted to make a difference. Henry wanted to fly more than anything else. 

That would have been enough for Tommy. He would have followed him into training, into war, into battle but it was Henry who told him not to.

Not long after, Tommy's best friend and first love left for the Airforce — first for training, then for war — leaving the city without a backward glance. His final words to Tommy were said in a disappointingly generic fashion. 

“So long, mate,” Henry had said with a small salute.

“I’ll write, okay?” Tommy responded and Henry nodded noncommittally. 

When he received news of Henry's plane going down the third week into the war, Tommy felt numbness even as he retreated alone to his bedroom, ignoring the tears of his younger sisters who had been eavesdropping in the hallway as his parents gave him the news. With his bedroom door clicking shut behind him, he sat on his bed with his feet planted firmly on the ground. There, his pulse thrummed loudly in his ears until exhaustion and a dreamless sleep overtook him. 

He didn't shed a tear at the funeral. Instead, he occupied himself thinking of an abstract war he had wrongly thought he could ignore.

It was only a matter of time before his own dealings with the war would begin.

 

 

**1939**

In the first months of training after he was drafted into the army, Tommy lived on autopilot. What remained of his carefree, childish youth was over, marred by the ghosts of a war he was only just beginning to understand. How it took Henry, how it would likely take the majority of the men in his squadron, how it would take him — Tommy was beginning to understand this. In training though, he could distract himself with the routines, waking up at five in the morning, making his bed, running five kilometres uphill, running five kilometres back down, washing up, keeping his head down at breakfast, running drills, shooting targets. His training was grueling but he found that the harder he pushed, the less he could feel the pit growing in his chest. And accordingly, the less he spoke, the less he felt like shouting. _Don't get attached_ , he thought.

_Don't get attached_. It was sound advice, given to him a few weeks into training. Sam Buer was a tall lad with piercing blue eyes and the kind of blonde hair that landed German boys in Hitler Youth before they could say "nein danke". He wasn't much older than Tommy himself. Tommy first noticed him at orientation on their first night on the grounds.

Buer had a terse way of speaking and stood up with his back straight. He was disciplined, and with a name like Buer, he had to be. His family had Norwegian and German roots and yet, it was never held against him. If he were anyone else, Buer would have found all his comrades and all the superior officers trying to break him. Instead, he had an aura of authority that was impenetrable.

Tommy observed him from a distance, sadly noting the familiar bone structure and blue eyes. He looked like Henry, arrestingly so.

Buer cornered him in the utility shed. Buer, with his piercing blue eyes and soft yet firm handshake, Buer, who didn't say anything unless asked a direct question — Buer had noticed Tommy too.

“You never let it get to you,” he said.

Tommy shrugged, still that fog of grief clouding his thoughts.

“You don't say much.”

Words weren't needed to run drills or clean weapons. They certainly weren't needed when he was on his knees in front of him. 

“Don't get attached, okay?”

When Buer held him against the cold brick of the utility shed, Tommy didn't feel attached.

 

 

In those months of training for the BEF, Tommy found absolution in the small spaces they crammed themselves between, where he could unleash all the pent-up rage he didn't know he had in him. 

Tommy had been happy up until a year ago. He had been carefree — but Henry's death had triggered a darkness that threatened to consume him and Buer coaxed him out in that half relaxed, half serious way of his. Slowly, he softened, they both did, but Tommy remained a different person from who he once was. He couldn't get attached, not as long as there was a war left to fight. 

 

 

**1940**

Once deployed, the British Expeditionary Forces were in France fighting a losing battle. The German army used techniques that left hundred year old towns just a pile of rubble in a matter of minutes. There were hushed accounts of their superior army, superior training, superior weapons. 

To Tommy, it was laughable how much those months of training had felt like child's play next to the physical and emotional exhaustion of war. He was sick. He couldn't bear to see any more men shot or dismembered in battle, and yet, that’s exactly what was expected of him. Grin and bear it, and kill as many fucking Jerries as he could before they killed him — that’s what he was told.

The retreat to the coast felt endless.

Buer was picked off one afternoon in the chaos. His last words to Tommy were uttered loudly in the heat of battle and they were words of coordination, nothing poetic about them.

When he crossed the French perimeter with bullets behind him, he felt sick at the sight of thousands of soldiers waiting for evacuation. Horses and artillery were ditched, soldiers were stirring incoherently, and the French were embittered. Instead of towels and beach umbrellas, a once thriving beach town was now littered with bodies and bombshells. 

His stomach churned horribly and he ran to the sand dunes.

That was when he met him, a man burying a fellow soldier in a shallow grave.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! The next chapter will be up soon. I'd appreciate any feedback in the meantime.


End file.
